T.S. for ZCG (December 2025)

Governance ZCG Elections
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I’m the ‘be as much like aquietinvestor as possible’ candidate.

The tourists/passers-by from the ZEC-USD price hike seem to left the Zcash Discord for now.
Now is a time to regroup and reorganise for growth, looking forward to an influx of pragmatic users (in the ‘Crossing the Chasm’ sense) next year.

ECC under Josh and his team are the forefront of that. Zashi + Keystone is the early majority UX to Zcash. Zashi is not the only wallet, it’s the reference wallet. Keystone being the same for cold storage.

It’s great there is so much interest in Zcash governance. New blood is always positive.
We even have our own meme candidate for ZCG (in UK terms, our own Screaming Lord Sutch, if you will).

ZCG is people oriented work. Based on a hard nosed approach, yes, but requiring a bias towards collaboration, not conflict. Can’t be shy to give needed feedback, but respectful and direct is always best when dealing with potential grantees.

Frankly, some current ZCG candidates would make better advocates/influencers of Zcash than ZCG members. Even though I believe they are truly champions, more than mercenaries.

But now is not the time to entertain a hostile takeover of the project by the oligarchic capture of token-based governance.

That is primarily a comment on certain high profile crypto influencers who have posted on X (AKA Crypto Twitter) recently in strong terms about pure coinholder voting for the Zcash project’s governance.

I’m running again for ZCG, partly to bring this to the fore. I’m against just pure coinholder voting for governance. I may not know exactly what we need, but I know it’s not that. There’s a place for it in governance, but not for everything, everywhere, all at once.

I ran for ZCG in June when the token price in USD was 50. I became active in the community in 2023 when the token price was 20.

Now the compensation rise for ZCG members has attracted more good candidates (designed that way). I’m proud!

More on what I favour project wise, in a later post. For now, kind reader, refer to my earlier ZCG nomination posts for my background and biases.

One thing I do promise is to try to always be as crisp and not-soggy as possible.

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Thank you for the endorsement! - meme candidate

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Not to go off-topic too much, but I guess the equivalent to the Screaming Lord in the US is Vermin Supreme.

But we should not underestimate such candidates. Some of Screaming Lord Such’s policies were eventually adopted by mainstream parties and became law in the UK. Satire sometimes brims with absurdly prescient ideas.

P.S. I agree with many of the things you mention in your candidacy thread so far. Certainly more than some of the others who are running. You don’t just shoot from the hip without thinking. Thoughtfulness is a virtuous trait.

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OK, time for what I favour.

I won’t bother talking about process and approach because the established norms within ZCG under the current committee seem fine to me. (I read the fortnightly summaries. And so can you.)

I have a bias towards retroactive grants. Pay 'em up front unicorns do exist. But I’m a born skeptic when people are asking for large sums of free money up-front.

Over a 15 year period ending in 2022, I personally vetted thousands of merchant and supplier applications from 80+ countries worldwide, and was not shy to give needed feedback.

As the merchant of record, we underwrote the credit risk ourselves. I had a lot of skin in the game because of that being one of the shareholders bearing the risk. It shaped my approach and biases.

More important than being good at picking winners, was spotting those that needed to be rejected. Again, a skill I honed over a long period of hard experience.

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Specific projects I favour.

Those that result in getting more shielded ZEC into the Orchard pool, and allow it to be used as shielded peer to peer electronic cash. Zcash is for spending.

That’s basically it. As this is an appointment for a year, that’s what I will focus on.
Other stuff is secondary. Important, but not urgent compared to that.

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